


Nowhere Unless You're There

by fhartz91



Series: Klaine Valentines Challenge 2018 [11]
Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Established Relationship, Future Fic, M/M, Memory Loss, Romance, eventual mention of a hate crime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-26 02:35:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13848273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fhartz91/pseuds/fhartz91
Summary: Kurt goes to the park every day at the exact same time to enjoy the sun and sketch in his journal, but something about his favorite routine doesn’t feel the same anymore. One day, while contemplating why the sketches in his journal don’t look the way they’re supposed to, he meets a gorgeous man he can almost swear he knows from somewhere, but whose face he cannot place.





	1. Everything I Do ...

**Author's Note:**

> This is re-write written for the Klaine Valentine's Challenge prompt "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You". Warnings will be vague so as not to give away the plot too much. IF THIS ISN'T WHAT YOU'RE EXPECTING AND IT MAKES YOU UPSET, DON'T GET MAD AT ME FOR READING IT.

Kurt takes a seat on his park bench, and with a deep, relaxed sigh, becomes one with the weathered wood beneath him. He opens his journal, pulls out his pencil, and starts to sketch. Okay, it’s not  _his_  bench, per se, but it’s the one he sits at every day, so it might as well be. Maybe he’ll dictate in his will that after he dies, someone needs to buy a plaque for this bench that says  _Kurt Hummel Sat Here … A Lot_. Not that he ever has to fight for it, which always strikes him as odd because it’s by far the best bench in the park - installed beside an ancient oak tree whose branches separate just so that it lets the rays of afternoon sun peek through while still shielding him from the bulk of their glare, keeping him comfortably cool. It’s also in front of the duck pond, the right distance away so that overflow doesn’t drench the ground beneath his feet. Various water fowl walk their families past it in search of spare crusts of bread. He forgot the stale loaf that he leaves by his front door today, like he did yesterday, and the day before. It’s probably molded by now. He’ll toss it and wait for another one to go stale, but it still irks him.

He hates wasting things.

It’s strange how much his mind has been wandering off on him lately that he can’t even remember to grab a loaf of bread on his way out the door.

The temperature is warm for a start-of-spring day, and Kurt invites it. He’s getting sick of chilly weather. But the sun doesn’t feel the way it used to. He can’t explain the difference, but then who would he explain it to? He doesn’t talk to his old friends anymore. No one calls. No one comes to visit. It bothered him once, but not so much now. He finds he quite likes spending time alone.

Maybe it’s because he’s getting older, he thinks with a chuckle, but that can’t be. He’s only …

Kurt’s head pops up from his drawing while he thinks. For some reason, he can’t remember how old he is. He tries to do the math in his head, but he can’t recall the year. He chuckles again. It’s such a weird feeling. It’s not like it’s waiting on the tip of his tongue, or lingering in the back of his mind out of reach. It’s gone. Completely gone.

What the hell is going on?

He shrugs it off. He’s probably tired. He’ll go to bed an hour earlier tonight. That should fix it.

He looks down at the sketch he’s working on and frowns when he sees it. Everything he’s drawn looks like nonsense. He flips through the pages. Many of them are empty, but the used pages look the same - scribbled on, like by a three-year-old with a black crayon.

Could he have grabbed the wrong book?

Maybe this is a dream, Kurt thinks anxiously. That might explain the off sensation of the sun on his face. But on the bright side, if it is a dream, Kurt can conjure himself up a handsome, dapper …

“Hello there.”

 _Jackpot_.

The voice comes out of nowhere, and now Kurt is convinced that he’s dreaming. If it wasn’t for the pain in his back that’s been developing slowly over time, twinging when he shifts to see where the voice came from, he’d be sold.

The man is backlit, a halo of sunlight surrounding his head, filtering into Kurt’s vision so that Kurt can’t make out the details of his face. But something in that voice sounded vaguely familiar. Kurt raises a hand to block the sun and get a better look.

“Do I know you?” he asks. With his hand over his eyes he can make out better the man’s sculpted cheekbones, a slight slope of a nose, a brow furrowed in amusement, and golden-whiskey eyes that resemble a thought Kurt had a while ago when he …

When he what? What was he doing when he had that thought of eyes like these? He hasn’t a clue.

“Occasionally,” the man replies. He gestures to the bench. “May I sit?”

Kurt raises an eyebrow. He doesn’t know why he’s hesitant. Wasn’t he thinking a second ago about how wonderful it would be to meet a handsome man in his dreams? This man definitely fits that bill, and then some. But he smiles with a secret hiding on his lips. And those eyes, the way they look at him, like they know him, like they’ve seen him before, and not sitting on a bench in Central Park.

It’s not the fact that this man is a stranger that bothers Kurt. It’s the fact that he feels this man knows him. But like the conundrum of his age,  _why_  he feels that way keeps ducking out of his reach.

“Be my guest,” Kurt says, deciding to return to his journal. They’re in a huge park, in a city filled with people. There is no way this guy is here for him.

“That’s a wonderful design for a jacket you’re working on there,” the man says, glancing over at the journal open in Kurt’s lap.

Kurt opens his mouth, ready to set the man straight, that this isn’t his book, and this mess on the page isn’t his sketch of a jacket. But when Kurt looks down at the page, he sees it. It  _is_  a jacket. Had it always been? That’s what he was working on, but it was indecipherable chicken scratch before.

Wasn’t it?

“Is there something wrong?” the man asks, his brow pulling in the middle as he stares familiarly into Kurt’s face.

“Uh, no,” Kurt says quickly. “No, there’s nothing wrong. I …” Kurt closes the journal and examines the cover – brown leather, creased on the spine, and worn where the oils from his hand have eaten into the material over time. He recognizes it. It’s definitely his journal, and an important one, too. It was a present. Someone gave it to him. An _important_ someone. “I thought I had grabbed the wrong book.”

“So, that’s not your sketch of a jacket?” the man asks, but Kurt knows by his tone that he’s teasing.

Being teased by this man warms Kurt’s whole body more than the sun.

“Yes, it is.” Kurt hides his eyes bashfully. “It absolutely is. Thank you for the compliment, by the way.”

“Not at all.” The man reaches for Kurt’s knee, but stops with his hand hovering in the air. A second later, he curls his fingers in and brings it back to his side.

“You know, it’s been kind of a weird day,” Kurt admits, looking at the hand that’s no longer anywhere near his knee. “I’ve been forgetting a lot of things this morning.”

“Oh?” It’s a single, non-committal syllable, but when the man says it, he sounds disappointed.

“Yeah. For a while, I thought I might be dreaming.”

The man’s eyes – expressive golden eyes, clear and deep, surreal in their beauty – seem filled with worry, but he smiles softly. “You know, there’s a way we can check if you’re dreaming or not.”

Kurt tilts his head. “How?”

The man leans in. Kurt mirrors the move, drawing closer, ready to hear the secret.

Ready to hear all this man’s secrets, if he’s willing to spill.

“Kiss me,” the man whispers, and the words – those two little words – take Kurt’s breath, the next one, and three or four after that.

Time slows as Kurt decides what he should do. He can’t just kiss this guy. He’s only known him about three minutes. But it feels so nice to be flirted with. Kurt can’t remember the last time someone flirted with him. There’s such an allure to him, like he was made to order – a perfect match to Kurt’s specifications. Kurt doesn’t exactly feel like he’s meeting him. He feels like he’s _finding_ him; like he was meant to find him.

But how can he if they’ve never met?

Kurt is still not ruling out dreaming, or maybe a hallucination, but none of that means he’s _easy_.

So he comes up with a response that will solve all of those issues at once. At least, he hopes it does. He doesn’t want to frighten the man off.

But if this is just a dream, he’ll be back.

“Find me here tomorrow,” Kurt whispers back, letting his eyes drift down to the man’s lips - a minor indulgence, “and we’ll see.”

The man licks his lower lip, and Kurt bites his. He may have whimpered as well. Kurt imagines those lips on his and his reaction to that is embarrassingly swift.

The man smiles. “It’s a date.” This time, he pats Kurt’s knee, the touch sending sparks throughout Kurt’s entire body, up so far as his brain, firing off with a hundred feelings, sounds, and images at once, none that he can catch but which feel important. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Kurt doesn’t watch the man leave. That’s not how he wants to remember him – walking away, leaving him alone. He returns to his sketch, chewing on the inside of his cheek in thought and making a few alterations – mainly to the model wearing the jacket. It’s not an exact rendering of this gorgeous man by any means, but with the way Kurt’s memory keeps slipping through cracks and holes, he doesn’t want to forget him. No, it’s not exact, but he can always improve on it tomorrow.

If the man _does_ return, maybe Kurt can use it as an excuse to get him to stay longer.

***

Blaine stands from the edge of the bed, and with a wistful glance back, walks out of the room. He closes the heavy door carefully behind him, not wanting the sound of the lock clicking to disturb Kurt in any way. Kurt is smiling, scribbling nonsense in his journal, biting his lower lip and giggling to himself. That’s the way Blaine loves to see his husband –so giddy, so hopeful.

“You know, you don’t have to come tomorrow, Mr. Anderson,” Dr. Stan, Kurt’s neurologist, says. Dr. Stan is a stern, husky, greying man in a stiff white coat, always with a clipboard in his hands. His clipboard seems to be more of a prop than a tool since he doesn’t ever refer to it or write anything on it, not that Blaine has seen.

Blaine huffs and gives the doctor an irritated once over. He used to be polite about that remark, nod at the man’s concern, but Blaine is so over that. That one sentence has become the man’s catch phrase, and he wields it as if he’s required by law to say it after every visit. The doctor looks at Blaine poignantly, waiting for him to agree, but Blaine shakes his head instead.

But only to keep from rolling his eyes.

“You’ve been telling me that every day for the past year.”

Dr. Stan sighs at Blaine’s response. “Your determination with regard to your husband’s recovery is admirable, and talking to him is doing wonders in helping to improve his brain functions. I just want you to remember that his memory isn’t going to come back all at once. This is a process. A little at a time.”

“Your point?” Blaine asks, exhaustion adding an edge to his words that he’d normally edit out.

“You see him for a few minutes, and then you stand outside this door for hours,” he points out as if Blaine doesn’t know. “All day even.”

Blaine puts his hands on his hips and shrugs. “Where else would I be?” He feels like he’s running around in circles. He knows that he’ll have this same conversation to look forward to when he returns to see Kurt tomorrow.

He can hardly wait.

“There must be something else you want to do with your life. You can come Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It’ll be the same thing to your husband.”

“Am I  _bothering_  you?” Blaine asks, jumping on the defense. He didn’t used to. He used to take the time to explain, to negotiate, to make Dr. Stan understand that that’s not just his husband in that room, but his entire life. If he leaves Kurt behind and doesn’t return, even for a day, he runs the risk of losing that life, and he can’t do that. He’ll _never_ do that. His patience in having his actions questioned has long since worn thin. Just as his husband has become a different person - a person who doesn’t remember that Blaine, or a life outside of Central Park, exists - Blaine has changed, too.

He’s becoming an asshole.

“Because if I am, I can always take my husband, and the money I spend for you people to treat him, to a different facility. One that doesn’t badger me when I come to visit.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Anderson,” Dr. Stan says, deeply apologetic and so sincere about it that Blaine can’t tell if the man is really sorry or if this is a good act. “Of course you’re not bothering us. And no, we don’t want you to move your husband to a different facility, but not because of your money. We host one of the finest facilities in the country for handling patients with his particular diagnosis. But as a doctor, I’m charged with making sure that the needs of the family are being met as well. Your health is a concern to us, too. Your husband needs you strong, Mr. Anderson. I don’t think he’d want you putting your life on hold, especially not on his account.”

Blaine’s rage extinguishes a degree, and that, ironically, infuriates him. He wants to be angry at this doctor, but he’s not. He’s angry that it’s been a year and Kurt still doesn’t seem to be any closer to coming home than he did after the accident that zapped his long-term memory. He feels cheated out of that time that he can’t ever get back.

And the future, from his own uneducated standpoint, looks bleak.

These visits are all Blaine has.

They might be all he ever has.

“He’s my husband,” Blaine argues, but the way those words get lodged in his throat, they sound more like a plea.

“But in an hour, he won’t remember that you’ve been here. Not the way you want him to.”

Blaine looks through the window at Kurt sitting on his bed, smiling as he draws in his journal. He runs his fingertips down the clear, double-paned glass, tracing around the profile of his husband’s face. Physically, he hasn’t changed a hair since the day they brought him in.

He’s barely changed in the past twenty years they’ve been together.

“But  _I’ll_  remember.”

 


	2. I Do it for You

Blaine looks at Kurt the way new lovers look at each other – with hope and anticipation.

He also looks at Kurt the way old lovers look at each other – with reverence and longing.

But for the longest time, when Kurt looked at Blaine, his eyes were empty, and that felt like a searing hot poker ramming through Blaine’s heart.

Blaine takes his pain one day at a time and considers himself lucky to have it, regardless of what progress (or lack thereof) Kurt makes. He could have lost Kurt altogether. He could be visiting a grave day after day instead of a hospital room. At least Blaine has his husband with him, in whatever form he takes.

Some people in the world aren’t as lucky, like the ones who attend the twice weekly support group Blaine goes to. Parents, siblings, children, significant others – so many loved ones gone, so many lives cut short. The heartbroken gather on Tuesday and Thursday nights, sitting in a classroom at the hospital to talk about the steps they take to feel halfway okay, the ways they find strength to get through their day, the guilt they carry for being healthy and alive. When it’s Blaine’s turn to share, when he describes the loneliness he feels, the madness of having the man he loves physically close enough to touch yet mentally far away, they stare at him with watery eyes and wobbly smiles, most wishing they could have what he has. They wonder why them and not him, willing to trade their lives of sorrow for his life of struggle in a heartbeat.

Blaine agrees. If he was in their shoes, he’d think the same way.

But there are things that those envious people don’t know.

Not all of Blaine’s visits with Kurt have gone smoothly.

When Kurt was first admitted to the hospital, Blaine wouldn’t leave his husband’s side. He was determined to spend every second of his life and every cent he had helping Kurt recover. Kurt had to be put into a medically induced coma from the start until the swelling in his brain subsided. Blaine camped in a chair by Kurt’s bedside, holding his husband’s hand. He rarely ate anything that didn’t come from the vending machine down the hall. The times he left the hospital to bathe and change his clothes he could count on one hand. He didn’t speak to the nurses who came into the room to check Kurt’s vitals or his IV drip aside from the odd murmur  _hello_. He knew he was being impolite, but he didn’t have it in him to care. He wasn’t there to make small talk. He was waiting for his husband to come back to him.

Life had stopped for Kurt, so Blaine went into hibernation with him until he woke again.

The day Kurt came out of his coma and opened his eyes was the happiest of Blaine’s life – or so he  _thought_  it would be. Blaine had spent so much time with only his thoughts for company that he’d had everything planned out in his head, already decided how things would go from here - bed rest, physical and occupational therapy, a load of counseling, and Kurt would be ready to come home. Kurt had always been a quick healer. Nothing kept him down for long. With his fierce determination, Blaine figured they were looking at Kurt staying in the hospital for a few months tops, then they would have their lives back. The neurologist tried to warn Blaine that might not be the case. They didn’t know the full extent of the damage, what residual effects there might be, but Blaine found it hard to listen to those warnings when the only thing he could think of was taking his husband home.

_Get Kurt home and everything will be all right._

Blaine was convinced that once he got Kurt back to familiar surroundings, things would fall back into place. But the greeting Blaine received when Kurt opened his eyes was one of absolute terror – breath stuttering, heart racing, mind slipping into shock. When Blaine tried to touch him, Kurt recoiled. After several long seconds of Kurt screaming himself hoarse, Blaine was forced to leave, and Kurt had to be sedated. The doctor recommended reintroducing Kurt to his husband in small doses – one minute here, half a minute there. Time after time, Kurt would see Blaine coming and immediately become frightened, until Blaine’s visits had him relegated to the hallway, staring in through the small, square window on the door.

No one understood Kurt’s reaction to his husband. When Blaine visited Kurt, Kurt saw a stranger, and for some reason, he responded with fear. The doctors couldn’t explain why Blaine’s presence triggered these panic attacks, but it did, which made Blaine persona non grata until they could find an answer. Somewhere in the middle of countless specialists performing scans and running tests, trying to solve the mystery, Kurt’s recognition of Blaine slipped away entirely, which meant Blaine was free to visit, but Kurt didn’t have a clue who he was.

Blaine took advantage of it, stopping by every day to visit his husband, talk with him even if he didn’t get any kind of response, any flicker of acknowledgment. Fear turned into tolerance, tolerance into acceptance, and eventually acceptance became curiosity. Kurt’s neurologist, Dr. Stan, wasn’t 100% correct when he said that in an hour Kurt wouldn’t remember that he had been there. Something of Blaine imprinted itself on Kurt with every visit. The more time Blaine spent around Kurt, parts of him stuck in Kurt’s memory, like his brooding eyes and his crooked half-smile. The doctors knew because of the doodles in Kurt’s sketch book - repeated drawings of a particular man’s eyes and smile, the details sharpening over time.

As Kurt’s brain healed, the thought of Blaine became clearer in that Kurt understood Blaine wasn’t there to hurt him, even if he didn’t know  _how_  he knew. Old memories didn’t necessarily return, but new ones were created. With any luck, the doctors told Blaine, a bridge would be built, and those two sets of memories would collide.

Blaine didn’t like the choice of the word  _collide_. It sounded dangerous, painful.

As it turned out, collide was the perfect word for it when it finally happened.

Shortly after Blaine left from his last visit, where he plucked up the courage to ask his husband for a kiss, something he had never risked asking for before, after he watched Kurt eat his dinner, take his evening meds, and climb into bed - the nightmares began. Kurt had experienced one or two in the past that had knocked him out of bed and kept him awake for a week, scared of everyone, paranoid that anyone who came into his room was there to hurt him.

Because Kurt didn’t just lose his memory in a random accident. He had been attacked. On the one afternoon in three years that Blaine had been running late for their regularly scheduled lunch date, Kurt was beaten – herded onto a vacant trail and pummeled by teenagers armed with bricks.

Teenagers who had been targeting him for days, waiting to get him alone.

That’s the reason why, doctors speculate, Kurt’s memory doesn’t extend past that afternoon in Central Park. In his brain, he’s stuck there, has been for over a year, sitting on the bench where he and Blaine usually met up, waiting for his husband to arrive.

And Blaine does, every day, even if Kurt doesn’t know it.

Dr. Stan assured Blaine that the nightmares were actually a positive sign - a symptom of his brain firing back up, trying to fill in the gaps of the time he had lost. It would open the door to other memories, non-violent memories, memories of family and home. Apparently, the worse the nightmares got, the more vivid, the more terrifyingly real, the better. It was almost morbid how elated the doctor seemed relaying that information to Blaine, like Christmas had come at last, even if it came in the form of a huge, spiked mallet hammering away at Kurt’s brain.

Blaine wanted to share in the doctor’s confidence, but it killed him to think of his husband that way – not necessarily the lingering memory loss, but the pain. The fear. Knowing that one night, the memory of that attack was going to rise up from wherever it was buried and hit Kurt full-force. He was going to relive it, every wrenching minute of it, again and again until he could find a way to vocalize it, find the words to describe it. Then maybe he could defeat it and move on.

And Blaine has every intention of being there when it does.

Blaine has no illusions anymore. He knows Kurt’s journey will be long and difficult, but he has faith in his husband. Blaine knows firsthand the strength Kurt Hummel possesses, what kind of a fighter he is. Kurt never took crap from bullies - not from the jocks that tossed him into dumpsters, not from the boy who assaulted him in high school, not from the guy who tried his hardest to tear the two of them apart.

In life and in recovery, Kurt has already come far. He is a strong, independent man, with more heart, more soul, more strength of purpose than anyone Blaine knows.

That’s what Blaine sees when he looks at his husband.

Now, two-and-a-half years to the day after Kurt was first admitted, Blaine sits beside his husband on his bed and tries to see what Kurt has seen every single day that he’s been there.

 _Central Park_ \- the grass green and freshly cut, the trees in full spring array, the cornflower sky clear and cloudless. Kurt loved the quality of light at the beginning of spring more than any other time. He claimed it was softer, purer, better for drawing. That’s why he went there on his lunch hour to work on his sketches instead of meeting Blaine at the theater the way he would have preferred.

But because Blaine loved Kurt, he ordered their lunches at a nearby deli and met him there.

That park bench, bathed in sunlight, nestled beneath the blossoming trees … that’s where Kurt goes to in his head, though, in reality, he’s a patient at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

It’s fall, and it’s pouring rain outside.

Blaine sighs as the rain picks up momentum and pounds loudly against Kurt’s window. He flicks his wrist and glances at his watch. _A quarter past noon_. Food services will be by soon with lunch, and a nurse will stop in with Kurt’s afternoon meds. Blaine pats Kurt’s knee and stands, stretching his arms over his head, twisting at the midsection left and right to crack his stiff back. He takes a peek at Kurt’s sketch book, balanced in his lap. Kurt is bent over it, charcoal pencil scratching out the design for a suit that actually resembles a suit – and not just any suit, but the kind of suits Kurt designed when he worked at  _Vogue_.

A job his boss Isabelle assures Blaine is waiting for Kurt whenever he’s ready to go back.

Blaine turns away from Kurt and his sketches and walks toward the door.

Kurt’s head pops up as he watches him leave. “Wait! B--Blaine?”

Blaine stops and looks at his husband. “Yes, love?”

“You’re … you’re not … are you leaving?” Kurt stops sketching, his hand worrying the pencil between stained fingers, twiddling it back and forth like a baton.

“No. I’m not leaving. I’m just going to get some coffee. Do you want something?”

Kurt nods with a slightly confused but thoughtful expression on his face. “I … I think so.”

“Name it.”

Kurt licks his lips nervously. He sets his sketchbook and pencil aside. His hands return to his knees, fingers wrapping around the joints, nails scratching at the denim on his legs.

“Kiss me?”

Blaine walks slowly back to the bed with a smile on his lips and gently presses his mouth against Kurt’s. Kurt’s breath catches at the first contact the way it always does, but a second later, he relaxes into the familiar sensation of his husband kissing him. When Blaine starts to pull away, Kurt’s mouth follows, and Blaine gives in, sitting back down on the bed.

Coffee can wait a little while longer.

Nothing in the world is more important than this.

Sometimes Kurt doesn’t remember that Blaine lives with him at the hospital as of late, in an annex specifically designed for families of patients battling long-term illnesses. Sometimes Kurt doesn’t remember how he takes his coffee. Sometimes Kurt doesn’t remember that his favorite food is cheesecake or that he’s allergic to kiwis. But that’s okay. _Blaine_ remembers.

And Kurt remembers Blaine now. That’s all that matters.

This time, when Blaine leaves - when he stops kissing his husband and goes down the hallway to get his coffee - he knows Kurt will know who he is when he comes back.

 


End file.
